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What do you think of when somebody says children’s book? Maurice Sendak, J. M. Barrie, Lewis Carroll, Roald Dahl, E. B. White, A. A. Milne, C. S. Lewis... the list goes on. There are so many amazing, spectacularly creative, really important children’s books out there. So where are the children’s games? Well?
We've got Bratz: Girls Really Rock. Pony Friends. Dora the Explorer: Dora's Big Birthday Adventure. Fuck Dora the Explorer. Nobody is going to remember Dora the Explorer. Can you imagine a world without The BFG? Think of how many children that have been touched by that single book alone. Who feels an emotional attachment to Dora the Goddamn Explorer?
Is anybody else terrified by this? Am I the only one who thinks that this is absolutely pathetic? Because it is. It's woefully, unacceptably, utterly inadequate. It's inexcusable - and you know who's fault it is? It's our fault. We let this happen. We got lazy, guys. Important children's games don't exist because nobody cares enough to take the risk.
Which, again, is absolutely pathetic. Games are an industry, sure. If nobody's making any money, nothing is going to work at all - but risks are how great things happen. If nobody's taking risks, then nobody's innovating, nothing new happens, and everything stagnates. People just stick with what's a safe, definite sale.
Children aren't a quick buck. At least, they shouldn't be. Children's media need to be more polished than adult media if they want to be any good. Writing for children takes much more effort. You need to have a lot more focus, you need to be a lot clearer, you don't have any room to pad things out with filler. Everything needs to be as concise and simple as possible, all the while trying not to be pretentious, and talking down. It's not easy. It takes a different skill set than writing for an adult audience.
So why isn't anybody trying? Why isn't there a single brilliant children's game? There are games that children can play, certainly. You could have a child play Minecraft just fine, but Minecraft isn't important. At least, not in the same way that, say, Peter Pan is. Minecraft isn't a timeless classic. It's just lego blocks.
Obviously, I over simplify. It's a good game, yes, but you see my point. It's just fun. That's it. There's a spatial reasoning aspect, sure, which is important in cognitive development and all that, but this isn't a story. There's no narrative. Children playing Minecraft aren't bettering themselves. They're just dicking around for funsies. Building tree forts. Making castles. Exploring.
Which by no means are bad things. It's good that children can build tree forts, make castles and explore - but there are so many more important things that children's games could be doing. They could be playing games that teach them about life, love, growing up, anything at all. There could be children's games that are as timelessly perfect as The Moomin books. Instead we've got fucking SpongeBob SquarePants: Creature From the Krusty Krab. That's deplorable. I feel like screaming until my lungs explode. Like setting things on fire until there's nothing left to burn. Does nobody else thing this is so unbelievably awful? So disgustingly dreadful?
Games can be more than just a fun, stupid party game for a kid to waste a few hours on. You know that, I know that, we all know that. We all know how many things games can be. Just like we all know Roger Ebert is a close minded fool. I myself have been writing recently on some of the games I've played, and why they were important to me. Beyond Good & Evil made me care, Majora's Mask made me sad, Planescape: Torment made me think, Grim Fandango made me hope, and each of them made me cry. Not that we need a running total of how much of a blubbering heap of emotion I am.
All of those games were important, but they aren't children's games in any way. I remember playing Grim Fandango when it first came out. I was just a kid, and it was on a display computer in a department store. I messed around with some of the controls, and I didn't like it at all. I was confused, frustrated, and bored. I thought it was terrible, and yet, here we are.
Giving a child something like Planescape is like giving them Bleak House, or Heart of Darkness. It's an important work, definitely. It has a clear, unambiguous place in the history of its medium, yes, but it isn't going to work. Children aren't going to care about the portraits that Dickens painstakingly paints of people in Bleak House. Because it wasn't written for them. Obviously it doesn't make them any less important. They just aren't going to understand or enjoy it at all.
Just stop for a moment and think. We live in a world where the game of the movie of Where the Wild Things are, Motherfucking Where the Wild Things are, was a fucking cash-grab. This was a game based of Maurice Sendak. This should have been teeming with imagination. This should have been infinitely creative, a wonderful adventure inspiring generations of children. What is it, instead? It's a boring platformer. That's it. Just a generic, ordinary platformer. Are we okay with that? Are we okay with living in a world where a game based on a Maurice Sendak book is anything less than breathtaking, let alone underwhelming? I'm sure as hell not.
What is wrong with the world when it's okay that children don't have spectacular games to play? What is wrong with us? Why are things this way? Why can't we have a Tintin of games? Or an Asterix & Obelix? Where is the Jules Verne of video games?
There are very few things that I can do well, but one of them is writing. I can write. I went to university. I have written poems, prose, short stories, longer stories, fiction, non fiction, stupid articles about video games, journalistic interviews, you name it - and lately, I've been trying to write children's stories. You know what I would love to do now? What would be my dream job? Writing a children's game.
Maybe you're an artist. Maybe you're a programmer? Possible a game designer. Maybe you're a mystical shaman versed in the arts I am told are called rendering. Whatever your skill set is, maybe you and I can come together on this one. Consider this an open letter. Maybe you're a big shot in video games. Maybe you work with two guys for a tiny indy company. Maybe you're a neckbeard at your keyboard in your bedroom inbetween shifts at the dish pit, just like me. Whoever you are, and whatever you do, listen.
Stand with me, dear reader, and take my hand. Let's do something important. That actually matters. Let's make something beautiful. Something magical, something wonderful, something classic. Let's make something worth remembering.
Dear reader, let's make memories. Let's change a child's life forever.
Let's make a game.
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Recent ones are Mario Kart Wii/DS, New Super Mario Bros. Wii/DS, Minecraft (Minecraft is incredible important, if it has a retail version, it would probably sell 5-10 times more then it does now) WoW and so forth.
Sure, most of them were from the 2D-era or are exclusive to Nintendo/Blizzard.
"Obviously, I over simplify. It's a good game, yes, but you see my point. It's just fun. That's it. There's a spatial reasoning aspect, sure, which is important in cognitive development and all that, but this isn't a story. There's no narrative. Children playing Minecraft aren't bettering themselves. They're just dicking around for funsies. Building tree forts. Making castles. Exploring"
Really...building tree forts, making castles...exploring isn't important for a child? Have you never seen children play with each other? This is the shit that they do! Minecraft captured the very essence of child's play. So there's no story in Minecraft...who cares? Games don't need story. Games don't require story. Story is a secondary, even tertiary factor of why people play games. The primary reason people play games is for fun.
Don't be a misguided fool to think "story" will automatically transforms video games into art. People hate (excessive) story in video games. This last generation has proven that aplenty. Games need to be games, the art part will come automatically after that...when the games suddenly sell so much, you can't ignore it (that's how movies were recognized as an art form).
Also, Beyond Good & Evil was a kid's game and didn't hide it. If you can't recognize that, you should really re-consider making "your" child's game/story.
And in the realm of apps, anything made by Duck Duck Moose. They are brilliantly interactive for their target age.
I've thought a lot about this via my own children, and I watch what they gravitate to, and what engages and them and sparks their imagination.
Admittedly the market is flooded with crappy children's games, but there are some great all ages games out there that are great for children (depending on what age you're talking about).
And I might add, the classics that you speak of were written decades apart. VG for kids (when considering console and mobile saturation in to the mass market) is really less than 15 years old.
Interesting article though.
Actually, come to think of it, if the mechanics were a bit more simple, I think Team ICO games are great children's games, although I wonder if children have the patience to actually play through either of those games.
Whoa there bucko. Since when does a game need a great story to be a great game? I'd argue that story is something games are very bad at, intrinsically bad, because of their interactive nature. But whether or not you agree with that, it seems a wild leap across logic from there to that kids aren't bettering themselves, they aren't learning. Minecraft, for example, is about cooperative creation. In modern society that's probably one of the most bankable skills you can possibly learn. Heck, it's what everone in our entire industry gets paid to do every day! Not bettering themselves? Get real.
Zelda, Mario, Minecraft, and more these are every bit enduring, quality pieces of art like "Where the Wild Things Are."
Of course you can, and have, listed many more bad games. Par for the course. Seems you just need a dose of Sturgeon's Law.
Q: Why are 90% of kid's games crap?
A: Because 90% of everything is crap.
"Dicking around for funsies" is the very essence of gaming. If you seriously think "dicking around for funsies" is something bad, maybe you should be making movies instead of games.
Edit: For clarity, I agree with you that kid's games ought to be taken a little more seriously, and you have an excellent point about Where The Wild Things Are - a movie that was, essentially, about the innocence of play and what happens when we have to learn the boundaries of where it meets the real world.
Like Minecraft, in other words? :-) i.e., "I can build anything I want. Wheee! Hey you undid part of my structure! Why did you do that? Although honestly I must admit that's a little cooler ... say, wanna build something together?"
The majority of my professional career has been as an artist on children's titles (including a few blasphemed in the above article) and I can speak from experience that t these games have a small budget, smaller dev cycle and are seen as an ancillary to reinforce the Brand. Therefore, very little time is given to making these games stand out experiences of their own. Once while working on a game I hoped to introduce a portion of gameplay that would teach a few basic math skills, I was told 'we do not want to teach new skills, simply reinforce what they already know'. It struck me that this was a good analogy for many children's video games in general.
However, it must be remembered that video games are still a relatively young world. As with anything, it will take a few visionaries with something to prove and cash to survive the attempt of it to find a way to incorporate incredible gameplay and immersive storylines that isn't a time killer, but a timeless classic that children bettered by and changed for having experienced it. I only hope I get to be a part of the dev team.
Minecraft is the BEST child's game, in the same way Legos are the BEST childrens toys. They push a child to form itself through free creativity, rather than become a passive consumer.
Remember collecting GI Joes, or MASK, or Transformers? That stuff was awesome but it left no lasting impression beyond pop cult curiosity. I read Lewis, Dahl, Verne, Ende, and Tolkien when I was a kid, and you know what memories and impressions persist? Realizing Duplo blocks were somewhat compatible with Legos, and being able to integrate Technics legos with a train set to create a machine that would systematically dump Playmo men into a fire.
For a child, play is the ultimate narrative, and any constructed narrative encountered elsewhere is mere inspiration for more play. If anything, Minecraft is the paragon of children's gaming.
One game that very much succeeds in the aims Mathhew seems to have in mind is Little King's Story for Wii. Though its difficulty level puts it out of reach for many children, its narrative brilliantly combines theme (the way a child makes sense of the world around him, and overcomes his fears by relegating them to the realm of fantasy) and form (it's a Pikmin-like strategy game where you have to literally conquer your fears, personified by seven kingdoms). Especially its cathartic ending is just genius. When I finished Little King's Story, I had the exact same response as I had when I watched Where The Wild Things Are; both works have a brilliant understanding of the interplay between a child's imagination and development.
It depends of course on the ages we are talking about, but I can quickly name:
tag,
checkers,
snakes and ladders,
baseball,
duck duck goose,
go fish,
set,
all the stuff that they are continually inventing on their own
Pretty sure that stuff is at least as important as any children's book.
Actually, there are five even bigger factors than that:
1) Sometimes a company that makes good childrens' games simply doesn't survive. The Learning Company's games were every bit as important to me growing up as 321 Contact and Square One. But The Learning Company and Br0derbund and the rest all went out of business and/or were sold off long ago.
So maybe you want to make a great childrens' game, but you never get the chance to do better than a good childrens' game because your bosses change every five minutes and you end up not being able to do childrens' games at all by the time you're ready to make your magnum opus.
2) Other than a) specifically educational games designed around an explicit curriculum for a particular grade and b) "all ages" games: most childrens' games are created as deliberately disposable entertainment to be traded in and/or discarded. This is because the people who have wallets expect kids' games to be mindless disposable entertainment. Because many adults are just looking for something to keep the kids distracted, because they have extremely low expectations of games and/or their kids.
So maybe you want to make a great childrens' game, but there's no market for it, or at least your bosses think so. And the sad thing is: they're at least partly right.
3) So you have a great license, a decent budget thanks to the license, and a great opportunity to do something with it. And they need it to ship in six months. Which is barely enough time to make a crappy but complete game with as few bugs as possible.
So maybe you want to make a great childrens' game, but you're being f%^&ed over by the simple fact that you don't even have time to make a good game.
4) You DID make a great game! ... And nobody wants you to make a follow-up. Because as awesome as your game is, nobody noticed that it was a great game except a few hundred dedicated fans who your bosses aggressively ignore.
So maybe you want to make another great childrens' game but... s#!t happens.
5) And no one wants to deal with reasons 1 through 4.
Building a sold educational game around age appropriate curriculum was exciting. Yet, the educational technology doesn't change that much that you'd need to have a new game every year. Do it once and then sell it forever.
I'd love to redo a game for Toddlers using the Kinect technology (and it looks like Double Fine is doing something with their Sesame Street game that looks really cool).
There are a lot of good games out there today. Wizards 101, Wesnoth, and many others mentioned above. In addition, there are tons of free flash games that kids are playing.
And the pokemon games still are some of my kid's favorites.
Things like Scratch or LEGO Mindstorms are pretty cool as well.
And more people are playing European style board games that use all sorts of different and interesting mechanics.
And role-playing games and collectible card games. Kids have amazing amounts of different and fun games to play in addition to the old classics.
And all the children's games mentioned in the blog post are licensed titles, related to either toys or TV shows. It's a little unfair to suggest they're entirely representative of all the children's games on the market, when there are plenty of quality titles that have been mentioned in the responses to this piece. Just because a game isn't explicitly marketed at kids, doesn't mean it's not suitable for them.